Israel- A Book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

And thoughts

Israel- A Book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Thoughts, and this Un Statement from Oct 14th, 2023... almost two weeks old.

When I was young my idea of Israel was shaped by Leon Uris's Exodus, water and growth and civilization from a desert... orange groves, plant a tree in barren lands. Later, a relative by a family marriage, a Palestinian, opened my eyes to how his family had fled Palestine (many well off Palestinians had moved to save themselves before the ethnic cleansing started)

Since then, I have learned that the fable of a new land that was based on all the good and romance of the founding of Israel was true, but not true, because much of the story had been left out.

A desert, not really, aquifers had watered villages there for centuries. And of the horrors, I knew vaguely that Began had been a terrorist and of Ariel Sharons slaughter in Lebanon. I had watched Jenin and listened to Chomsky, and Finkelstein. But I did not know of the early history of Israel.

I now, halfway through The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe. have a better Idea.

And this awareness has hit me hard, much like when I first became aware of the deliberate attempts to exterminate the American Indians in the Early History of the United States. (In nursery school I wanted an Indian suit and wore it to fight the cowboys, so perhaps I am susceptible to the put upon the underdog)

The Irony of Israel is that it was founded fleeing evil, by an evil, labeled since WW2… Ethnic Cleansing.

And that cleansing has continued off and on… Deliberate. When you read Pappe's book you realize in the acts, the barbarism, the communications, the approvals by Ben Gurion, the reports of some decent British officers, that there is little doubt. Other recent and former books have said the same.

Here are some excerpts from the book's introduction and early pages.

Excerpts from Ilyan Pappe, The ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

‘I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’ David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938

The Red House where much of the ethnic cleansing was planned:Today the house is no longer there, a victim of development, which has razed this architectural relic to the ground to make room for a car park next to the new Sheraton Hotel.

Thus, in this street, too, no trace is left of the ‘White City’, which it has slowly transmogrified into the sprawling, polluted, extravagant metropolis that is modern Tel-Aviv.

In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country.

3. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.

Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population.

The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own.

This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.

4. In the words of one of the first historians to note the significance of that plan, Simcha Flapan, ‘The military campaign against the Arabs, including the “conquest and destruction of the rural areas” was set forth in the Hagana’s Plan Dalet’.

5. The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine. As the first chapters of this book will attempt to show, this plan was both the inevitable product of the Zionist ideological impulse to have an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine, and a response to developments on the ground once the British cabinet had decided to end the mandate. Clashes with local Palestinian militias provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.

The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948.

6. Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.

The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all, its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity.

After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied.

And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel.

This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity, and the people who perpetrate it today are considered criminals to be brought before special tribunals.

It may be difficult to decide how one ought to refer to or deal with, in the legal sphere, those who initiated and perpetrated ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1948, but it is possible to reconstruct their crimes and to arrive at both an historiographical account that will prove more accurate than the ones achieved so far, and a moral position of greater integrity.

We know the names of the people who sat in that room on the top floor of the Red House, beneath Marxist-style posters that carried such slogans as ‘Brothers in Arms’ and ‘The Fist of Steel’, and showed ‘new’ Jews...

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine [https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing.../dp/1851685553](https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553?fbclid=IwAR01rJex1YXvDy_2nguhRMiK7lMBQxoKDH_dwb9eYKmKCFw4pNTQmPpXN0k)